Verigames’ services span the entire breadth of testing related needs for Video Games Manufacturers as well as Casino and Online Games companies

A CASE STUDY ON OFFSHORE GAMES TESTING :

Description:
Customer is one of the largest online betting and gaming companies in UK.
Customer provides fixed odds gaming and betting services through various channels such as Internet, mobile, Interactive TV, WAP and telephone
In addition to this customer also has a casino which provides facility to bet and play games on actual terminals (kiosks).

Customer is currently engaged in development of online and casino games and betting applications that are made available on their websites.

Customer need:
The requirement was of setting up independent offshore QA team. This team will be responsible for testing of games and betting application for its functionality, compatibility and usability.

Since all the testing was to be carried out offshore, connectivity with customer environment was required. This was done by setting up VPN connectivity to the customers test environments.

Functional Testing:
This involved setting up a testing methodology that would be applied during test execution for each game or betting applications.
High level activities that were identified and agreed for testing were as follows
 Requirement Review.
 Preparing Testing Objective document – Identifying test conditions for which eachgame/application will be tested.
 Test Case Writing .
 Test Execution – Functional and Compatibility.
 Closure Report – Consists of consolidated defects reported during testing, tracking efforts spent on testing, our observations and suggestion for improvement.

Compatibility Testing:
This involved testing the game application for its look and feel on various combinations of browsers and flash versions. Basically testing was conducted on Win 2K , Mozilla Firefox and Flash versions (Version 6 and 8).

Usability Testing:
This involved setting up a usability lab at Verisoft office and observe and study the user experiences while game play activity.

Regression Automation:
Detailed tool evaluation was done to identify the possibility of automation and identify the tool which could be used for automation. Automation process was setup that would be used during scripting for automation regression. Tool feasibility was carried out for 4 tools. At the end of this activity, a report was submitted to the client that described the support by each of the tool. Tool that could be used for automation was suggested in this report.

Major Activities:
Tested more than 50 games that are currently in production on customers websites.
Testing of Kiosk project from Onsite and Offshore – this involved testing the software components for betting as well as games from offshore and test execution on actual devices being carried out by our resources onsite.
Tested new games site launched by customer that consisted of porting all the existing games from their old site to new site plus new games were also tested for integration with back end and compatibility.
Mobile Games were tested using java emulators. Games were tested for their functionality integration with back systems. Since the games were already available on other channels testing was also done to verify that the game works correctly on both the channels.

Key Success:
Building Domain Expertise - Initial period during this engagement was spent by the offshore team to understand the customer’s domain in detail. This included study of business workflows for betting applications and understanding game architecture.
Timely delivery for each project and during all the major releases.
Flexible onsite Offshore model.
Ability to increase the team size based on project requirements.
Being able to establish proper training mechanism with the help of customer, this enables new members of the team to come up to speed in short duration of time.